I started seeing Kathy in 1993. I had known I needed therapy for a long time, but I was terrified of it because I was so terrified of the vulnerability of telling someone about my experiences, and specifically since I was a small child was very insecure about talking, and well, therapy does involve a lot of talking generally. By this time though, I was becoming so self destructive I was ready to try it.
Unfortunately, going in to it I thought a therapist would help me find a way to find my voice, would help me to feel safe, would perhaps give me a little validation. Unfortunately, I was assigned to a therapist who used confrontation as her main style. A therapist who, when my voice was smothered by my own shame and terror smugly told me to get out of her office because she had work to do, and I needed to come back when I was ready to talk. Unfortunately, when I tried to initiate the conversation about the original thing that I had identified as the issue I needed to work on by saying "I had a flashback about" the thing, her response with no further information than that statement was to tell me that she didn't think that I knew what a flashback was, and then she made me define a flashback. No further conversation about the flashback, or the material related to it. No questions, no "how did that make you feel", nothing.
And as I was thinking about this earlier, I realized that it was 10 years and multiple therapists into my therapy journey before I finally found a therapist who patiently sat with me in the mire and muck of MY presenting issue. Ten years before I found a therapist who helped me to find a way to tell my story. Ten years before someone said, "that's fucked up, I'm so sorry you experienced that." Ten years of wasted time, ten years of therapists in new and interesting ways letting me know that it wasn't safe to share my story. And it all started with Kathy.
